The bildungsroman is a troubled framework. Some critics even claim that it doesn’t really exist. It is a genre that centres memory (which is fallible and inherently dubious) and narrative (which is anachronistic to talking about something as random and episodic as human life). The bildungsroman is a coming-of-age story, but it specifically entails positive character growth from a state of incompleteness, into a higher, more complete version of the self. Classically, this manifests as the consolidation of a career for boys and of marriage for girls. Necessarily, the story preceding this end goal follows how it came into fruition through the means of education and romance. Despite the trials and twists that make up the bulk of the story, we know how things will end. The structure is rigid. We know that the ongoing construction project of the adolescence will eventually coalesce into the supposed height of human flourishing–– love, marriage, and children. The bildungsroman is about the settling of an individual’s identity into an orderly societal slot, and of the promise of continuity. But in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, it’s not clear exactly whose identity is being formed and whose slot is to be filled.
The beginning of Frankenstein has all the making of a bildungsroman. Opening “I am by birth a Genovese,” the beginning shares a striking resemblance to David Copperfield’s “I am born,” and subsequent exposition into the people and structures that frame his entry into the world. Both begin with an establishment of an individual subject, followed closely with a peripheral object (the family they are born into) to serve as the context of their existence. With David Copperfield being in some ways the archetypal bildungsroman, being met with such a similar beginning suggests to the reader that what they are about to read in Frankenstein will hold a similar, unquestionable understanding of whose coming-of-age this will be. Of course, why start with the Genovese if he is not the subject of development? It is in this way that the beginning of the novel gives a false premise of simplicity. We are lulled into the familiarity of following Victor’s education and miseducation, but then, sharply woken with the rise of something alien to the genre. A second subject is born. Not only that, but born before the first subject reaches the completeness requisite of arriving to marriage and family as an end goal. In otherwards, if we are to imagine The Creature as a child, it was born at the wrong time. And because of this, both it and its parent, Victor, are in a state of simultaneous development. The Creature creates a meta-narrative that calls into question exactly whose bildungsroman this is.
To address this question, we must first define what we mean by the “subject” of the story as related to the bildungsroman. Alternative names of the genre are very telling in this regard. These alternatives include the novel of education, Erziehungsroman, and the novel of development, Entwicklungsroman, but it can also be the “novel of socialization, novel of formation, novel of youth, [and/or] novel of initiation” (Maynard 281). All of these descriptors prescribe a variable, multi-faceted idea of growth, but from it, we can glean that the subject must be the one on which these ideas are enacted. They are the recipient–– the sponge absorbing education, and culture, and all of these other forces of change. To be the subject in a bildungsroman means to be acted upon, and only to become the actor at the very end. After a few hundred pages of societal structures acting upon them, they are integrated into these very structures and participate in their propagation. An example of this can be imagined as a child being shaped by the structure of family (which is posed as an external force) and their story comes into fruition at the establishment of their own family (and the structure becomes internally propagated).
There is a case to be made for the idea of Victor as the subject. The bildungsroman is a first person genre, and from the very first sentence, it is undeniable that Victor will be the central the “I” distinguished from all other characters. The first chapter deals with two central facets that paint the context within which Victor comes to exist: family and education. Physically, he comes to exist through his family. The story is as follows: his father’s best friend becomes ill and dies, the friend’s daughter falls into poverty, Victor’s father marries the girl to save her from that fate, and Victor is born of their union. Before he is even born, there are interlacing relationships that foreground his being and he is the product of a human bodies by way of sex and pregnancy. After establishing the people and circumstance which Victor is born into, the logical next step in establishing this character as the subject is to give context to his internality. Culturally and psychologically, he comes to exist through education. He is the product of outdated and ill-informed natural philosophy. Cornelius Agrippa, Albertus Magnus, and the elder Frankenstein’s error to dissuade his son from these authors, act as the parents of Victor’s mind. Inside and out, Victor comes from somewhere. This is significant because it distinguishes him from the supporting characters who are not given nearly as much nuanced foregrounding for their development. Elizabeth is his sister-wife and Clerval is his kind-hearted family friend, but we know that Frankenstein can’t possibly be their story. We know this because they have no origin (or in Elizabeth’s case, a very sparse one). We don’t know what makes them “tick”. We don’t know why they are the way that they are. It is impossible to have a novel tracking development without a contextualized starting point for that development to begin.
Victor’s study brings him to Ingolstadt, and it is here that we see the framework of the bildungsroman, and Victor’s role as its subject, begins to fall apart at the seams. Education does not bring him closer to an ossified purpose or sense of self. It does not bring him closer to moral revelation or romantic passion. He climbs and climbs the ladder of knowledge only to take a sharp downward trajectory in what we are calling “development”. The promising young man creates a monster and there is no going back. While other bildungsromans feature moments of weakness and faulty decisions by their subject, they are learning moments. Tragedy and horrifically misguided things may happen, but they ultimately construct a better, stronger person. They contribute in some positive capacity by leading the subject in the direction of flourishing (though they may not see it in the moment). Nothing of the sort happens in Frankenstein. Victor stitching together dead bodies, releasing a new, conscious agent into society, and spending the rest of the skating the responsibility of this creature has no such redeemable aspect to his life’s trajectory. Frankenstein cannot be his bildungsroman, his story of positive construction, if he ends in a more wretched state than he began.
Victor grows up, but he does not grow out, and because of this, I do not believe that this is his coming-of-age, nor that he comes of age at all. It is possible to be a grown man externally, but internally be a child. It is his lack of accountability that leaves him as an unfinished human being all the way to the very end, never reaching the closure of killing the Creature nor telling the truth until it was too late to do so. Though he began on the path of a textbook protagonist, handling hurdles in his family life and absorbing the world’s lessons as any good literary subject does, by chapter 5 it becomes clear that something is something deeply rotted in this boy’s psyche. It wasn’t even the construction of the Creature that undid his growth, if Victor had never run away and hidden in his room after the Creature came to life, if he had killed it then and there, a tale of development still could have happened. If instead of remaining silent when Justine took the blame of killing William, if he had spilled the truth even if he were to be considered mad, a tale of development still could have happened. There were so many moments in which Victor’s character had the opportunity to be redeemed, but he chose the path of childishness again and again. He suffered under unimaginable guilt, but he could not rise above it to attain what is possibly one of the most parts of maturation: accountability. If we are to think of Victor as the subject, Frankenstein is a failed bildungsroman. It is an inversion of the genre. It’s possible to imagine Victor’s coming-of-age to be the dissolution of his naivety. His arc is one in which he begins in a state of child-like ignorance (informed by his unrestrained desire to study life and death) and ends in a state of knowledge about the consequences of his actions. But brooding and being tortured by consequences is not the same as actively addressing them. For this reason, he is stunted at an adolescent stage, never reaching the flourishing that could have been.
The Creature is Victor’s mirror. The Creature, being the deuteragonist, and only other character who’s existence is thoroughly contextualized, is the only other candidate to be the subject of the bildungsroman. But even then, he falls into the same structural pitfalls as his creator. Both of these characters begin on an upswing of gentlemanly potential and cultural acumen (though, for the Creature this was built in the wilderness rather than an estate in Geneva) and are stunted in a particular event. While Victor is permanently stuck as a terrified young man who cannot accept the horror of what he’s done, and the Creature is permanently stuck in the deep, cutting shame of being cast out by the cottagers, and by extent, of human society. When the Creature finishes telling Victor the story of his development, the emotional wall of anger and fear between the two prevents them from seeing that they are the same: they are both wretched. And they are both stuck. The Creature’s reign of terror over the rest of the text is the proactive flipside to Victor’s inactivity. For this reason, the Creature cannot be the subject of the bildungsroman either.
Frankenstein simply is not a bildungsroman because no one comes of age. No one is the subject of development, or at least not of completed development. By the half way mark of the text, Victor and the Creature are already in a zero sum game of hunting and evading the other that is only ever concluded by death. Clerval is killed before ever establishing his business ambitions. Elizabeth is killed before her marriage is ever consummated. All of the markers of human flourishing that define a subject’s end goal are stomped out. Where I believe Frankenstein stands in relation to the genre is as its antithesis. By the end of the text, all of the associated words like “development, education, formation, and wholeness”, are replaced by “destruction, ignorance, dismantling, and fracture”. There is no promise of progress nor of continuity through marriage and family. Frankenstein is a very nihilistic text in this way. What I make of this is that Victor and the Creature can both be considered the subject in so far as we see them be shaped by societal forces (like the judicial system, prejudice against disfigurement, family structures) into something different than they began as, but due to the sharp downward of their arcs, neither can be called the subject of development. Frankenstein is not a bildungsroman, but rather its gothic reckoning–– a story without closure, and not “about” any one person.